A literary coming of age

 In the mid 1800’s, it was not clear whether America would ever produce a writer as good as William Shakespeare.  Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville thought that we could, and wrote that Americans should support American authors.

 In the mid 19 th century, writers like Hawthorne, Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau produced some of the early masterpieces of American Literature.  The Americans called this time a renaissance, comparing it to the European Renaissance (a period of tremendous artistic and intellectual growth).  It was really more of a “coming of age,” as America was finally finding ways to compare to other literature around the world.

 Much of this burst of American literature can be attributed to a focus on self-improvement and intellectual inquiry taking place in New England.  Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of the primary forces behind this flowering of culture.  He helped inspire numerous reform movements that aimed to improve public education, end slavery, elevate the status of women, and generally improve social conditions.

 Numerous utopian projects were developed in the 1840’s – plans for creating a perfect society.  Emerson belonged to a club of Transcendentalists.  Transcendentalism was based on the philosophy of idealism, as well as the ideas of previous American thinkers.  Transcendentalists viewed Nature as a doorway to a mystical world holding important truths.

 Everything in the world (including human beings) is a reflection of the Divine Soul.  The physical facts of the natural world are a doorway to the spiritual or ideal world.  People can use their intuition to behold God’s spirit revealed in nature or their own souls.  Self-reliance and individualism must outweigh external authority and blind conformity to custom and tradition.  Spontaneous feelings and intuition are superior to deliberate intellectualism and rationality.

 Emerson believed in the power of intuition. Intuition is our ability to learn directly without conscious use of reasoning.  He emphasized the importance of each individual.  He had an optimistic outlook – he believed that each of us could access God and do the right thing if we trusted ourselves and not society.

 The flip side to Emerson’s optimistic coin came in the form of the Dark Romantics – Melville, Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe.  These writers acknowledged the existence of sin, pain, and evil in human life.